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Seafood Apologetics: Mussels, Shrimp, and Malt Vinegar

Dr. James J. S. Johnson

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.’ (Genesis 9:1-4)

God’s bioengineering genius is “clearly seen” in the everyday details of all of His diverse creatures, including the diverse (and sometimes bizarre) variety of creatures He has put into and on the tidewater edges of Earth’s oceans and seas.(1)

Eating seafood reminded me of this, recently—mussels, shrimp, and a little malt vinegar—three edible witnesses against evolution. In other words, eating seafood can remind us of creation apologetics evidences.

Mussels provide fossilized evidence of the cataclysmic Genesis Flood, as noted below. Vinegar is good when used carefully, but the idea of vinaigrette soup (or any other kind of soup), accidently morphing into whip-scorpions, only occurs in evolutionist fantasies. Also, shrimp populations, like Carbon-14 inside dinosaur bones, are often found in places where they weren’t expected. Details follow.

Don’t eat mussels if their shells are closed.

Picture a plate of seafood pasta, ringed with boiled mussels, posited like numbers on a clock-face. Which mussels should you eat? Only eat those with open shells; they were fresh-caught and thoroughly boiled—now safe to eat.

But what about mussels (and other bivalves) buried in the Genesis Flood? Here is a salient insight from Dr. David Rosevear:

On the beach one can see lots of bivalve shells, open like a butterfly’s extended wings. At death, the muscle holding the shells closed relaxes, and the two halves spread apart. Fossil bivalves are different. Their shells are tightly shut. They were buried alive. That process was instantaneous.(2)

Don’t eat closed-shell mussels! Either they weren’t cooked right, or they were catastrophically quick-buried and fossilized!

Either way, be careful! — misdirected squirts of vinegar (or lemon juice) can hit clothing, skin, or eyes. Vinegar on the fingers can cause trouble, too, especially if wet fingers are carelessly used to wipe eyes. But, used carefully, vinegar is good, as when an ingredient in hot-and-sour soup.(4) But not all “soups” are real.

Evolutionists expect us to believe that all life on Earth accidently assembled itself, like magic, inside a “warm little pond”, a “primordial soup” with all the needed biochemical ingredients.(5)

After innumerable entropy-defying biochemical “lucky accidents”,(5) they say, the “soup” ingredients magically morphed into self-replicating cells, and later into frogs, princes, and every other creature—including whip-scorpion vinegaroons that squirt out super-vinegar!(6) [This “genes-in-magic” is attributed to a mystical spirit-like force called “natural selection” — yet unthinking atoms cannot “select” anything, ever!]

If you don’t expect to find shrimp, you probably won’t look for them.

Dr. Johan Hjort was a trail-blazing ecologist who researched cold-water fishery populations (cod, herring, shrimp). In 1898, after modifying a deep-sea fishing trawl, Hjort found large populations of Great Northern Prawn (Pandalus borealis) in muddy sediments below Norwegian fjords. Because those shrimp were deemed “rare” and commercially irrelevant, Hjort’s reports were ignored. To refute his naysayers, Hjort chose actions over words: “[Hjort] went prawn fishing, returned to harbor with a spectacular catch and dumped it on the quay.”(7)

So even seafood can prompt us to think about creation apologetics evidences:

(a) mussels (or clams) remind us that the Flood was cataclysmic, not tranquil;

(b) vinegar reminds us that vinegaroons (and all other life-forms) were carefully created by God, not magical offspring of a “primordial soup”; and

(c) cold-water shrimp remind us that reality doesn’t disappear just because we aren’t looking at it—the real truth about God’s creation is “clearly seen”!(1) — but we must examine the evidence, whether it’s shrimp or C-14 in Triceratops bones.

(6) Vinegaroon whip-scorpions (Mastigoproctus giganteus) expel 85% acetic acid spray, much stronger than ordinary vinegar, which is only about 5%-to-8% acetic acid in water. In America’s Southwest, vinegaroons have been treated with due respect for generations, by young and old alike. Alma Abernathy, Bud and Me: The True Adventures of the Abernathy Boys (Dove Creek Press, 1998), pages 25 & 31.

(7) A. C. Hardy. 1950. “Johan Hjort: 1869-1948”, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 7(19):167-181. See also, Vera Schwach, “A Sea Change: Johan Hjort and the Natural Fluctuations in the Fish Stocks”, ICES Journal of Marine Science, 71(8):1993-1999 (October 2014), published by International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

(8) See Brian Thomas, “Carbon-14 Found in Dinosaur Fossils, ICR Creation Science Update (7-6-2015), citing Brian Thomas & Vance Nelson, “Radiocarbon in Dinosaur and Other Fossils”, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 51(4): 299-311 (spring 2015). Evolutionists, for generations, assumed that dinosaur bones are too old to have any measurable Carbon-14, so they don’t look at how much has always been there, exhibiting that dinosaurs died rather recently, not millions of years ago. In fact, using conventional Carbon-14 radiometric dating analysis, radiocarbon chemists have been famously wrong at dating skeletal bones of Vikings who died as recently as the late 800s A.D.! See James J. S. Johnson, “Viking Bones Contradict Carbon-14 Assumptions”, Acts & Facts, 47(5):21 (May 2018), posted at http://www.icr.org/article/viking-bones-contradict-c14-assumptions/ .

Last summer, in Baltimore, I enjoyed eating “Chesapeake Bay blue crab”—but was that what I actually ate? Why am I suspicious?

Blue crab, the Chesapeake Bay’s most iconic edible species, also appears to be its most impersonated. A report released April 1 [2015] … found that 38 percent of crab cakes labeled as local on menus in the region were made of an entirely different species of crab, predominantly one imported from the Indo-Pacific region. In Annapolis and Baltimore, nearly 50 percent of “Maryland” and “Chesapeake Bay” crab cakes were mislabeled.(1)

Before getting crabby about such false advertising (a type of bait-and-switch deception), such crustacean counterfeiting should be verified. How can portunid pretenses be proven?

“I’ve put a lot of seafood in my purse over the last few years,” said Dr. Kimberly Warner, author of the report(2) … [referring to] crab cake samples that she and other testers collected [and] shipped to a lab in Florida that determined whether the cakes contained blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, and, if not, which species were used instead. Warner said the fraud rate of 38 percent is a conservative estimate. … Mislabeling “is being done because it’s easier to sell a Maryland crab cake than one from the Philippines or Vietnam” [said Steve Vilnit, of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources].(1)

Dr. Warner lamented that bogus brachyurans are part of a treacherous trend of tricking tastebuds:

Maryland’s favorite seafood dish is not safe from a bait and switch. When diners are expecting the fresh, distinctive flavor of the Chesapeake blue crab, they may instead be served a completely different species, shipped from as far away as Indonesia. … This mislabeling rate is consistent with Oceana’s previous studies on fish and shrimp. In 2013, Oceana found that one-third of more than 1,200 fish samples were mislabeled according to [USDA] guidelines. We also found 30 percent of shrimp samples to be misrepresented to consumers in a similar study in 2014.(2)

Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab Meal?

Many restaurants, buffets, and sushi bars are swimming in similar seafood scams. Piscatorial masquerades include pollock playing cod, icefish as anchovies, tilapia as grouper, rockfish as red snapper. Customers, who eagerly eat what is falsely advertised as “albacore” (or “white tuna”), may experience a digestive insult: the look-alike meat of escolar fish (a/k/a “snake mackerel”) is wax-loaded and promptly produces a blasting vermillion diarrhea.

So, buyer, beware seafood mislabeling.

Creation or Evolution?

Yet there are worse bait-and-switch scams to warily watch out for, such as “creation apologetics” ministry mislabeling. Not all that is called “Biblical” origins science is genuinely true-to-Genesis.

Some unfaithful-to-Genesis organizations overtly disclose their “creation-by-evolution” doctrines. However, most do not conspicuously admit it, when compromising the Bible’s record of origins.

But you can recognize real messages, of ministries or “experts”, by their compatibility with Genesis.

Does the advertised “creation” teaching follow the uniformitarian dogma (and eons of “deep time”) of deists Charles Lyell and James Hutton? Does it incorporate Monsignor Lemaître’s “big bang” theory? Does it promote (or defend) the “natural selection” genes-in-magic sophistry of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley? Does it presuppose death before Adam, like Alexander Winchell (or William Dembski), within some kind of pre-Adamite “hominids-morphing-into- humans” scenario?

When scrutinizing the true ingredients—crab or shrimp or tunafish—in seafood cuisine, forensic genetics can detect the telltale DNA of the seafood actually sold. However, when scrutinizing whether an “apologetics expert” is truly a Biblical creationist, compare what those “experts” teach, specifically, with what the Scripture teaches (Acts 17:11).